I’m not old, but I did turn 40 today.  If you ask my kids, they are likely to say that I’ve gotten crabby over the past few years.  I haven’t shaken my fist at any pesky teenagers, but I’ve sure complained about thumping cars a time or two.

Since a birthday is a time for reflection, I’ve thought it might be a good time to take some of the “fist shaking” things in my life and put them away.  Because, when you really think about it.  Fist shaking takes energy and I’m getting into those years where I need to conserve some energy.

So here’s my list of ten things that I’m no longer going to care about… and you shouldn’t either.

1. Active/Active - Pink might be the new black, but any two node cluster with two instances is an active/active cluster.  We’ve been at this for probably ten years now and no one is willing to let this go.  Starting today… me neither.

2. Availability Groups vs AlwaysOn - Sure, AlwaysOn covers a slew of other technologies.  But, if we walk into any discussion on high availability will anyone know the difference if we say one or the other.

3. Deprecation of Database Mirroring/Profiler - How about this… if you need these features… don’t upgrade.  Really, that’ll solve the problem.  When it is a real problem in about 6 to 8 years.  Until then, we can find some spilled milk to cry over.

4. Standard Edition Memory Limits - Have you seen the memory limits for Azure Virtual Machines?  They get less than the Standard Edition of SQL Server 2012 and they have Enterprise Edition installed on them.  Of course, lots of memory can fix lots of problems.  But so can decent database code, you don’t hear me complaining about that.

5. DBCC Commands - Yes, I know.  Whipping these out makes me look cool, but so does restoring a database from the backup and just ignoring the fancy things I can do with DBCC PAGE.  Actually, restoring doesn’t make me look cool, it just gets the job done and timely.

6. MCM Cancellation - It sucks but there’s nothing I can do about it.  I could be pissed and hold the torch on this.  But really, when’s the last time that worked out for a few hundred people.  I know that it worked well for Custer in the Dakotas or the Texans over at the Alamo.  Yeah, the e-mail for it came out late on a Friday night.  But then again, maybe we shouldn’t have been reading career related e-mail’s on the weekend.

7. R2 on Anything - As long as Microsoft gives me new production bits, I don’t think it really matters.  Seriously, doesn’t confusing names and licensing changes help those of us that are consultants.  We should be saying thank you.  New features.  New opportunities.  Yes, this all works out well in the end.

8. V1 Features - And this reminds me… as long as we get an R2 or R3 every year, does it matter if some of the new features are V1.  Some may think of these as “half-baked”.  But really, the next version of SQL Server is almost out.  It’ll get updated then, so long as the feature still is being worked on.

9. PASS vs. PASS Summit - Actually, I never complained about this.  I just found out it’s a thing.  I’m going to give this up just because I’m too old to try and give something else up.

10. Going Blue – It’s all on and up in the cloud these days.  We hear Azure, Azure, Azure (in my best Jan voice).  Every few months we get new features, only in the cloud, sure wish on premise was getting this attention.  But thinking about this, I guess I don’t have to deal with as many network admins as I used to, and they are worse to deal with that teenagers.  So… I’m blue da ba dee.

I suppose there are a few more things that I am, or could, no longer care about.  There’s Klout, LinkedIn, or Google Plus, helping us measure the cost of our social networking.  But it is my birthday and its time to get to work.